It’s three holiday episodes of Doris’s corny, format-shifting ‘70s-era sitcom. Strictly as comedy, the show hasn’t aged at all well, but Day’s natural, sexy warmth still comes across, there’s a kitschy nostalgia to the mod fashions and décor, & there’s a gallery of great character actors like McLean Stevenson, Rose Marie, Kaye Ballard, Jackie Joseph, John Dehner, Bernie Kopell & Denver Pyle. The freak-out, however, is the third episode, an actual, no-kidding murder mystery, in which Doris must figure out who framed a local Santa Claus for shooting an old man! The half-hour includes a remote-control flying saucer, & Charles Nelson Reilly as the guest star. It’s like some fruitcake-and-eggnog-spawned pop-culture fever dream.
RIP to the hilarious Steve Landesberg, the deadpan Det. Dietrich of Barney Miller, passed on at 65.
No comments:
Post a Comment